rethinking marketing

Tag Archives: ROI

According to a recent Social Media Examiner study about the social media usage of both B2B and B2C organisations, resulting in over 3000 respondents; the overarching majority of marketers (86%) claim an importance of social media to their business. Whilst this result comes as no surprise and seems to correlate with other surveys, it is interesting to note that a mere 26% of marketers claim a proficiency in measuring the social media engagement’s impact on their business. This numbers becomes even more staggering if the social media marketing experience is taking into consideration. 45% of responding marketers have been using social media tactics for 2 -5 years, 5% of this group even claims a social media experience of over 5 years.

With agencies pushing hard to have their clients engage in Social Media Campaigns (particularly in B2C), it is interesting that despite big data and ongoing digitalisation, the majority of organisations is still willing to invest money without being able to measure its ROI. To proof Henry Ford’s famous quote about misguided marketing spending wrong, it is inevitable to not only be brave enough to try new things (e.g. social media efforts are largely trial and error based) but to continuously work on defining bottom line relations to increase attributable marketing spendings to business results.

Some efforts to define the social media marketing ROI exist, such as MDG’s ROI of social media or the famous HBR blog about the calculation of a “like value” in Facebook but most efforts seem to lack consistency in measurement and a lack of bottom line integration. Engagement and conversation measures are being frequently reported and often lead to wild claims about social media campaign success with high reported engagement numbers, yet they too lack to correlate social media engagement to to bottom line results or business objectives. This is were the smart, engaged and eager marketer needs to start to employ digital metrics to track multivariate correlations and subsequently develop smart social media cause effect models.

Adobe claims a top spot in online advertising with their funny Super Bowl commercial (see below) and well, their “You can measure Social Media ROI ad”. In times of smart data (I still refrain from using the word big data to specify the use of data for decision making advantages), this should come as no surprise, yet as it seems, business schools (as I currently experience the no 1 ranked business school in Europe), marketers and organisations still avoid the ROI discussion and shift to the topic of online brand building. I particularly like how Adobe uses current stereotypical personas to play in their ads – which in my opinion should put 85% of today’s marketers (see their Super Bowl ad), advertising agencies and “consultants” to shame.

YOU CAN MEASURE SOCIAL MEDIA ROI…

Adobe’s Super Bowl commercial… wondering who the “winner” is now:

As always, if you made it this far, check out the Adobe blog for more – worth a visit.

2012 has undoubtedly been the year of Social Media with tv ads in the decrease, mobile and smartphone spikes, gangnam style hitting 1 BILLION hits on youtube, pinterest becoming popular, instagram being sold, Facebook going from high to low, Apple issuing its first apology, social election revival in the US, mobile advertising hitting new records and, and, and… The attached infographic from SEO Company and Nowsourcing does a pretty good job in summing up the 2012 year in social media.

However, 2012 has also been the year to question unthoughtful media spendings in new channels with GM exiting its Facebook engagement and companies shifting budgets from campaigns to owned & earned content marketing.

My 2012 take-aways:

shift from campaign management to content marketing

increase customer centricity by listening on all channels

social media is not exclusive but inclusive – think multichannel marketing

change customer engagements to incentive driven third party marketing (I expect this to grow in 2013ff)

mobile and emerging technology cannot be longer ignored. The pace of technology diffusion has excelled in 2012 with changes in consumer adoption.

B2B caught up (to some extent) with B2C but continues to struggle to find its role and rightful place in Digital Marketing.

a savvy marketer does still have to think about target groups and how to best reach them – not every medium, despite its public sex appeal (e.g. Facebook) does lend itself to every marketing challenge.

ROI, ROI, ROI – marketers still struggle to define the ROI of digital marketing – which comes as a surprised based on the big data advantage of digital compared to traditional.